Cisco’s Splunk deal highlights growing interest in the intersection of cybersecurity and AI

Cisco Systems The company has never shied away from M&A, and Thursday’s agreement to acquire it proved it once again. splunk The deal, worth about $28 billion, will help the hardware giant expand into software.

This agreement is an enterprise software agreement. silver lake take Qualtrics It was taken private in March for $12.5 billion.

It also adds to what has been a big focus for investors in recent weeks: the role AI will play in cybersecurity, and vice versa. Cisco’s interest in the San Francisco-based data and security giant is due in no small part to his Splunk new detection and response AI product announced earlier this year.

Cisco Chairman and CEO: “Our integrated capabilities will drive the next generation of AI-powered security and observability.” chuck robbins said in release. “From threat detection and response to threat prediction and prevention, we help organizations of all sizes become more secure and resilient.”

Not the only deal

While the Cisco deal is the most impactful yet, it’s also been a busy few weeks for cyber AI in the civilian market.

Here’s a quick summary of some of the deals we’ve seen in this space recently.

• Based in Austin, Texas hidden layerDefending AI Models for Enterprises has raised $50 million in Series A led by: microsoftventure division of M12 and Moore Strategic Ventures.
• based in new york Patronus AIEvaluate and test language models at scale has raised $3 million in a seed round led by: Lightspeed Venture Partners.
• Based in Palo Alto, California legal securityaims to protect application development from AI threats and has raised $40 million in a round led by: CRV.
• Based in Sunnyvale, California Assess securityan AI-driven policy management cybersecurity startup, has raised $3 million in a seed round. bold cap, Cyber ​​Mentor Fund and Westwave Capital.

Impact of AI

While cybersecurity funding for startups has declined, just as funding has declined in most sectors except generative AI, investor interest in the crossover between security and AI persists. remain.

According to Crunchbase, cybersecurity startups that use AI, or startups in the AI ​​industry, have raised nearly $1 billion in 70 deals so far this year. data. That’s slightly off last year’s pace of $1.4 billion in 122 deals, but venture capital was stronger overall last year.

Part of that interest is due to the fact that both cybersecurity and AI have the potential to grow each other’s markets. Security will be needed to protect the data that LLMs use in their AI processes and to create guardrails for what information is used and how companies adopt AI modeling. Masu.

On the other hand, AI can be used in cybersecurity for various functions such as detection, remediation, and automation. Cybersecurity has also always been an early adopter of other technologies to strengthen any defenses. So it’s no surprise that many security startups are leveraging AI.

A few months ago, AI was one of the main topics at a conference. RSA Conference In San Francisco (I wrote about it here), the show was no different than last week.

One of the world’s largest technology companies is currently pumping tens of billions of dollars into the market, and we can expect even bigger weeks for AI cybersecurity to come.

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figure: Dom Guzman